


Twos and Threes

by Lilliburlero



Series: Consistently Homesick [3]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-20 15:53:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1516352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1969, and Rose Dodd has just published her first historical novel, tracing the relationship and rivalry of Themistocles and Aristides up to the Battle of Salamis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twos and Threes

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from 'In Praise of Limestone'.

Esther met Rose in the hall with a slightly distracted iteration of her usual warm kiss. ‘Darling, will you wait one moment here?  I have a surprise for you.’

‘Ooh, thrills.  Can’t wait.’  She sat down on the stairs.  Dudley, Esther’s dachshund, snuffled indifferently about her feet.  She patted him.  Dudley was Rose’s idea and gift, after the demise of Daks the poodle—a way of keeping the connection without attempting to replace the irreplaceable—but Rose would never be an animal person, and animals seemed to know and respect the reserve that had replaced childhood trepidation.

‘Now,’ Esther said, coming back into the hall, ‘close your eyes—’ she steered her into the living room.

‘—and open!’

‘Nacker!’

‘How are you?’

‘How are _you_?  Have you been quite well? You’re so _thin_.’

‘Dysentery. Charming, I know, but there it is. I’ve put a bit on, actually.’

‘Oh, how _horrid_.’

‘Practically everyone has a run-in with it at some point. Occupational hazard.’

‘Lovely suntan, though.’

Nicola swatted her.  ‘Don’t flatter me, my gel.  I'm _raddled_. I look fifty at least.’

‘So how is the survey going, Nick?’ Esther asked.

‘Oh, you know, always quite a few odd corners left to do. Rather super little horst and graben, at the moment.’  She ran a hand through straight hair sun-bleached almost white and reached for a cigarette. Of all the schoolfriends she still knew, Esther thought, Nicola had come closest to fulfilling her purpose. It came to her inevitably, from knowing what needed doing and doing it with more despatch and skill than anyone else, from the confidence placed in her by the faith of others, whether they were university fellows, labourers or village explainers.

‘Shall I make us some coffee, Essa?’ Rose asked.

‘I thought you best-selling authors drank only champagne.’

Rose blushed.  ‘Hardly best-selling. It’s only been out  a few weeks. Essa’s been finding excuses for me not to post your copy ever since, and now I know why.  And champagne! We had buckets of it at the launch.  I got pretty squiffy, actually.’

‘You won’t want any of the bottle that’s in the fridge then?’ teased Esther, ‘Or the second bottle?  I’ll go and fetch one, and you can make up your mind then.’

‘Oh, Nacker, did you? Two!'

'One's never enough—'

You shouldn’t have!’

‘Show me the tome, then.  I’ve been dying to see it.’

Rose fetched a hardback from a cardboard box under the coffee table.

‘Oh. It’s gorgeous. _Rose Dodd_ in gold and everything.  But,’ Nicola took a long drag on her cigarette and prodded the jacket illustration, ‘she wouldn’t float, you know, that draught is simply impossible, even for a trireme—’

‘I think it’s meant to be a bit, you know, _stylized_.  Look—look at the—’

Esther came back from the kitchen with three glasses, a cloth and bottle. ‘Can you handle this cork, Nick?  I’m not used to the high life.  It bangs at me.’

‘You wicked thing, Esther. She sends her love.’

‘Bet she doesn’t, really.’

‘Well, in her inimitable fashion.’

‘We went to see her at the National, of course.  I can’t say I’d actually ever noticed Maria before, there’s too much going on with Malvolio and so forth, but she did actually make something of her: sort of guilelessly scheming.  Of course, she was probably in a big snit at not being able to do Feste.’

Nicola stubbed her cigarette and applied herself to the champagne cork, as she did most things, with a discreet competence.

‘Well, here’s to _When the Sun Set_!’

‘And all who sail in her!’

‘Have you told Nick about the _TLS_ , love?’

‘Oh—Essa.  Don’t—’

‘It got a fantastic review by—’

‘You don’t _know_ , Ess.  No names, no packdrill.’

Esther lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t be a goose, my dear, who else could it be? All terse euphemisms and rather touching masculine fretting about responsibility for things that can’t possibly be one’s own fault—“they took on the obligations of men in their friendships” and all that noble rot.’

‘Any one of half-a-dozen—’

‘Oh, Rosie, you just _won’t_ take a compliment.  And this is a simply terrific one: you know he must have _asked_ to do it.  They’d never have the cheek to approach the great LPO for anything less than a lead article—’

‘Ladies, you’ve lost me with all this literary shop.’

‘Oh, Nick, I am sorry.  Rose got a marvellous review in the _Lit. Supp_. and I would wager Dudley’s _pelt_ —’

Nicola gasped in mock horror.

‘Shows how sure I am—that it’s by L.P. Odell.’

‘L.P.—?’

‘Oh, Nick.  You _know._ He’s always being a talking head on _Omnibus_ and things _._ Fiftyish _._ Rather square-set face. Wire-framed specs. _Devastatingly_ catty.’

‘Oh, yes, I know who you mean all right.  We even sometimes get the papers, you know.  About six weeks late.  Actually, I sort of knew him once—Rose, don’t you remember? That first Twelfth Night party you went to at the Merricks?  When you got locked into the—’

Rose, whose colour had only just returned to normal, reddened across seventeen years at the memory of her twelve-year-old self. ‘No.  Well, I _remember_ —so awfully embarrassing, and Daddy was _livid_.’

‘Well Laur—Odell was at that.  He lived nearby for few months.  He was friendly with Anthony Merrick, and he got really quite close to Patrick. I think there was a bit of a _tendresse_ there, you know, quite innocent—he was twice Patrick’s age—and of course he had—a—companion—’  Nicola, who had thought herself cent percent proof against the memory of Ralph Lanyon in the vestibule of Mariot Chase that night, suddenly found she wasn’t.

Esther, having extensive experience of and sympathy with confusion, had quite mistaken the source of Nicola’s, and rescued her with a tolerantly Botticellian smile. ‘Good Lord.  Nick, you led this impossibly glam home life, and you never once mentioned it at school. It always comes out in bits aeons later.’ 

‘ _Glam!_   Hardly. No-one knew who he was _then_. They lived in a tiny hovel with an outdoor lav, just on our side of Centaury Marshall.  Anyway, wasn’t it like that for you?  Home and school sort of belonged to different worlds—’

‘I suppose—’  Esther scarcely thought of the depressing inconsequentiality that her parents’ divorce had wrought as a _world._   School had been a _world_ , the holidays simply a flurry of visiting people in whose company she felt various degrees of discomfort and discomfiture.   

The champagne took effect in a scattered sequence of catch-ups and reminiscences.  Esther had made beef bourguignon for dinner, and a tipsy Rose giggled over hazardous attempts at crêpe suzette flambé. Esther, with the excuse of a 6am start applying modern good taste in landscaping to the gardens of Islington, retired before midnight.  

‘Would you like a liqueur, Nick?’ Rose asked.

‘Brandy, if you have any left after trying to burn the place down.’

‘Oh, I think so—’  They sat silently over their drinks for quite a while, both being people who recognized that thinking was an activity that could be pursued in company.  

‘Did Kay write to you about Giles and Marion, Rose?’ Nicola said suddenly.

Rose nodded unhappily.  Nicola had almost forgotten that her parents had separated too, before—or she realised in one of those humiliatingly belated insights into the blinding obvious that come of never having cared to reflect on the matter before— _because of_ Edwin and Kay. And then her mother had died in a crash. How simply ghastly Rose's childhood had been.

‘Letters don't always get out to us in the field, you know; there's no system for it. It's a bit like before the Penny Post. If someone's coming out they bring them, but otherwise they can get stuck at base for weeks. I only found out on my way back to England. His was rather marvellously gentlemanly and uninformative. Rowan said a bit more, of course, in hers, but only that things hadn't been well for a while, and they were both carrying on with other people. But when I was at Trennels everyone was being awfully careful with me about it. Even _Lawrie_. I do think it's daft—I looked up to him when I was a kid, of course—but it's not like—’ She trailed off, not really knowing what it wasn't like, exactly. Not like being hoist with her own petard. Not like watching a doodle steadily spreading over a grey paper file-cover. Not like sitting in the entrance hall of Mariot Chase that Twelfth Night.

‘May I?' Rose indicated Nicola's cigarettes.

'Natch.' Nicola lit two, handed Rose one.

'Look, Nick; I don’t think I should say this, perhaps, but—’ Rose glanced down into the brandy glass cupped in her right hand.  ‘I don’t think I would, in fact, if you hadn’t mentioned the Merricks' bash. And Odell. And the champagne. And the claret.  And this.’

‘All right, your inhibitions are at absolute zero. Roger. What’s that got to do with Giles?’

‘I saw him—that night.  With Patrick’s cousin, the one who was in the Guards. In the library.’

‘Saw him what?' 

'Getting on rather well.'

'Oh, _flaming Norah_.  Are you quite sure?'

Rose rolled her eyes and tilted her head.

'Sorry. But isn't it a woman he—Giles, I mean—has been seeing lately? Rowan said—no, actually, she _didn't_.'

'No, it—she—is. Karen _did_ say. I mean, I think what I saw could've been a one-off. I'm a bloody fool. I should never—'

'I'm glad you said.' Nicola drew hard on her cigarette, turning the tip into a sharp, blazing cone. 'I don't think it was a one-off. For one thing, it almost never is. I suppose there's a sense in which I _knew_ , I just didn't _think_. That night—well, I overheard a conversation, and I should've drawn the obvious. But I've never liked to make assumptions on the grounds of association, you know, and then Marion came along, and well, you just don't speculate, do you? Not with family. Couple of things make a lot more sense, or a different kind—something idiotic I did in my first term at Kingscote—never mind, I'm digressing.  And you mean you never breathed—’

‘No!  It was _private_!’

Nicola giggled, snorting rather; Rose sounded so virtuous.  'My dear, your face. Whatever did you think went _on_?  You were such a little mouse of a thing then.’

‘I thought it was like Alan Breck and Davy Balfour, you know.  Still do, rather.  Or like Odell said about Me Buke: Taking On The Obligations of Men—’

‘So you _do_ know it was him?

‘Well. One hears things said. At parties and so on.’

Nicola struggled to imagine Rose—or Esther, even with her grown-up, permissive-society poise—at a party, and then imagined the sort of party instead, and that made it easier. Overtaken suddenly by seriousness, she asked, 'is it why you didn’t—when Marion asked you to be a bridesmaid? Because you knew he was—deceiving her?’

‘No.  I didn’t think of it that way at all.  I wouldn’t, would I? Up to my eyes in ancient Athens? Though I think it must be sort of the reverse of ancient Athens with him, if you see what I mean.'

Nicola digested this with a _hm_ , finishing her cigarette.

Rose wondered if she'd gone too far, and added, 'No, the bridesmaid thing was just me being a mouse. People _looking_ at you all day long.’

‘Imagine what it’s like being the bride,’ Nicola agreed with relief.

‘Ugh! Thank God I’ll never have to.’

‘I rather feel that way myself.’

‘Was that a confession, Miss Marlow?’

‘No—I mean—not like that.  I don’t think.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t work that way as far as I'm concerned. I’m a person first, I think, and only incidentally—I mean, standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres aren't for me.  I mean, I hope one day there’ll be another person.  But I don’t know my person yet.’

She remembered thinking that same thought sitting in Stable Cottage all those years back, facing the chair that Laurie Odell had just vacated—and there was still no person, though she’d ended up, in many other respects, living the peripatetic life she’d decided she wanted that afternoon. She'd been too self-absorbed to think of it then, but it stuck with her, and she understood now why Laurie had got up preemptively when there'd been no practical need to intercept Ralph in the yard. It had been to exchange some personal phrase or gesture—because he'd been—not _worried_ —just _aware_ Ralph had been out all that foggy, dreich day on a skittish borrowed mount. Words came to her unbidden; she couldn't quite remember from where: _which they enter unannounced, as_ something something _certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival._ There wasn’t a human being alive that Nicola felt like that about: she’d had her run-ins with sex and affection, of course, but she always assumed others were quite as self-sufficient as she was herself.

‘Ground Control to Major Nick?’

‘Oh—yes.  I better get to bed.  I dare say it will all shake down,’ she said hardily, ‘with Giles and Marion—at least it's going to be easier to get a divorce quite soon, and little Pam won’t be the first.’

‘She’s going to Kingscote this September, isn’t she?’

‘Poor mite.  All on her lonesome.  I can’t imagine what it’s like there without hordes of sisters. How’s Fob, anyway?’

‘Being a zoo-keeper for the summer.  Whipsnade.’

‘How marvellously Fob. I think Mum did say, actually. I bet she's charming the tigers rotten. Look, thanks awfully for dinner.  I’m going to turn in.’

‘Don’t forget your copy—and Nick—look at the dedication. Not now.’

Nicola sat down heavily—nearly enough to capsize it—on the camp bed set up in Rose's study-boxroom.

 

_For N—M—; with thanks, for showing me the books._

_‘Safe in my room, beside the pier / I find my vessel fast.’_

 

**Author's Note:**

> The quotation that Nicola half-remembers is from Coleridge's 1817 gloss to 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'
> 
> Rose's dedication quotes Stevenson's 'My Bed is a Boat.'


End file.
